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ZDNet - Silicon Valley take note: you can be successful in tech and make the world a better place, too.

Tech is getting a pretty bad press right now, blamed for everything from widening gaps between parts of society to turning us into a bunch of passive consumers, craving the buzz we get from another social media like.

And it's true: until very recently, the big tech companies spent much more effort on growing their empires than considering the impact of what they have created. They've often trusted the algorithm, because adding humans into their processes was deemed too expensive -- and now those companies are learned, too late, that the algorithms are far from infallible.

But not all tech innovation has to be this way; one of the best examples of taking a different approach is the Raspberry Pi. The latest version has just launched: a tiny board with enough processing power to almost use it as a desktop -- all for $35.

The Register - The two engineers who further developed and popularized the concept of RISC microprocessors have won the 2017 ACM Turing Award.

Professors John Hennessy and David Patterson were today announced as this year's (or last year's, if you want to be particular about it) winners of the prestigious honor named after Brit super-boffin Alan Turing.

They'll get to split a $1m prize, courtesy of Google. Hennessy happens to be the executive chairman of Google parent Alphabet, and Patterson works on the Google Brain team, it must be said. Patterson has already confirmed he'll be donating his winnings to educational projects.

Of course, they earned the Turing gong. No suggestion of any favoritism here. No way, not when you consider their history.

Patterson led a UC Berkeley team that, in 1981, drew up the RISC-1, a 32-bit 31-instruction processor with 78 registers. The design used just 44,000 transistors, and outperformed CISC rivals that had more than double the number of transistors.

The RISC-1 would form the basis of today's RISC architectures, and was picked up by Sun Microsystems to create the Sparc family of processors.

"The large ecosystems of projects using the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x licenses will benefit from adoption of this more balanced approach to termination derived from GPLv3," explained Red Hat in a press release announcing the new license-compliance partners.

The companies which have agreed to adopt the "Common Cure Rights Commitment" said before they file or continue to prosecute those accused of violating covered licenses, they will allow for users to cure and reinstate their licenses. (More of the specific legal language around this is in Red Hat's press release.)

An effort to resolve conflicts between upcoming European privacy legislation and the global Whois service for domain names has, predictably, failed, raising fears that cybercriminals will take advantage of the impasse.

At the end of a week of meetings hosted by domain-name overseer ICANN, the US-based organization's proposed interim model lies in tatters, and there is no sign of a forthcoming solution before the May 25 deadline, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect.

Industry insiders fear that, without agreement, the Whois service, which publicly lists full contact details of domain-name registrants, will effectively shut down in order to avoid fines and possible lawsuits under the Euro rules.

That would leave law enforcement and intellectual property lawyers, among others, unable to access registrant details, and potentially give cybercriminals a larger window to carry out crimes.

Diginomica - CIO Charles Ewen says linkages with technology providers will help the Met Office generate big value for the public purse.

Huge increases in the amount of data produced, stored and processed means public sector organisations must think now about how they will work with external providers to create benefits for the citizen and other partner organisations.

That is the view of Charles Ewen, CIO at the Met Office, who is helping the UK’s weather service manage an exponential growth in information. Ewen joined the Met Office eight years ago and moved into the CIO position five years ago. He has spent the past few years pushing a digital transformation initiative at the organisation, which has included the procurement of three Cray XC40 supercomputers.

These systems, which are three of the world’s 50 largest supercomputers, are capable of processing more than 14,000 trillion arithmetic operations per second. The supercomputing project is expected to enable £2bn of socio-economic benefits across the UK through enhanced resilience to severe weather and related hazards. Potential benefits include better forecasting at airports, more sophisticated modelling related to flooding, improved information for energy markets, and new climate impacts research.